For Sale —American Paradise Read online

  FOR SALE—AMERICAN PARADISE

  FOR SALE—AMERICAN PARADISE

  How Our Nation Was Sold an Impossible Dream in Florida

  WILLIE DRYE

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2016 by Willie Drye

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

  ISBN 978-0-7627-9468-3 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4930-1899-4 (e-book)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  To the memory of two dear friends

  “We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

  —CHARLES MACKAY, MEMOIRS OF EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One: An Old Man’s Memories

  Chapter Two: Railroad to Dreamland

  Chapter Three: Dreamers and Thieves

  Chapter Four: Leave Your Brain at Home

  Chapter Five: The Stars Shine Brightest in Florida

  Chapter Six: The Bootlegger’s Curse

  Chapter Seven: “Many Die; Cities Razed”

  Chapter Eight: Spinning the Tempest

  Chapter Nine: Hope from the Swamp

  Chapter Ten: Mr. Brown in Paradise

  Chapter Eleven: Blown Away

  Chapter Twelve: Dreamland After All

  Acknowledgments

  A Note about Sources

  Notes

  CHAPTER ONE

  An Old Man’s Memories

  ON TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 1986, EDWIN A. MENNINGER WAS THE RELUCTANT guest of honor at his ninetieth birthday party, thrown by the chamber of commerce in Stuart, Florida.

  “I tried to talk them out of it,” Menninger told a Miami Herald reporter a few days earlier. “But they decided I needed a party, so I guess we’ll have one.”

  More than one hundred guests showed up. Menninger, frail and going blind, wore a pink camellia pinned to his lapel and a garland of purple azaleas draped around his neck. He seated himself in a rattan chair and took in the festivities like an aged, decorated chieftain being honored by his tropical tribe.

  “My, there’s quite a gang of people here, isn’t there?” Menninger murmured softly. When some of the guests wished him “Happy birthday,” a mischievous grin flashed across his face.

  “Merry Christmas!” he responded impishly.

  Despite the old man’s gentle irascibility, the guests made it clear that they adored him. The mayor said a new park would be named in his honor. One of the guests rose to speak about Menninger’s long and productive life.

  As Menninger listened to the tribute, the Florida that he had played a small part in creating hummed with activity that held the attention of people around the world. Wealthy snowbirds who’d fled the frigid Northeast several months earlier were enjoying their oceanfront homes at Palm Beach or Jupiter Island or Ocean Reef, or they were cruising aboard their yachts in the Keys or off Sanibel Island. Others were basking in the sunshine at small stadiums throughout the state as they watched Major League baseball players get ready for the upcoming season.

  In Port St. Lucie, Port Charlotte, and other rapidly growing retirement towns, retirees of more modest means were relaxing in their 2,000-square-foot homes on 10,000-square-foot lots, chatting on the phone with their grandkids back home in freezing places like Pittsburgh and Perth Amboy.

  In Orlando, thousands of excited families from all over the world were enjoying the squeaky-clean fantasies at Walt Disney World. And in Miami Beach, beautiful people and their entourages from Milan and Barcelona and other centers of European style were displaying themselves at trendy cafes and nightclubs on Ocean Drive.

  A few days before Menninger’s birthday party, millions of Americans had watched the latest irony-laden episode of Miami Vice, a trend-setting TV show in which stylish cops fought a ceaseless battle against fiendish and even more stylish criminals. Men across the country were cultivating the three-day stubble constantly sported by the show’s hero, vice cop Sonny Crockett. And they were copying Crockett’s fashionable South Florida wardrobe—linen slacks, loafers with no socks, and pale pastel-color T-shirts worn under expensive, unstructured Italian sports jackets. The look was becoming so popular that Macy’s department stores would soon open a Miami Vice section in its men’s clothing departments.

  The show’s set designers were making stars of Miami and Miami Beach. Every week, Miami’s flashy skyline, South Beach’s Art Deco architecture, and the cities’ gritty tropical streetscapes were captivating the show’s huge audience.

  But Edwin Menninger, who had once been a driving force in South Florida’s evolution from a swampy frontier to America’s winter playground, could no longer participate in what he’d helped set in motion. Now, all he could do was listen to the accolades of an admiring speaker.

  “Ed, we love you,” the speaker said in conclusion. The other guests stood and applauded.

  As the crowd sang “Happy Birthday,” Menninger struggled gamely to his feet and raised his right arm in acknowledgment. He seldom allowed his left arm—mangled in a long-ago accident in a college chemistry lab—to be displayed.

  Moments such as this stir the emotions and sometimes prompt old memories to come swirling into our thoughts. As Menninger looked around the room at the applauding crowd, he might have remembered a moment more than sixty years earlier when he’d been part of another festive crowd that was applauding a great man of that era.

  It was a breezy day in late June 1925, and Menninger, twenty-nine years old, was among a gathering of about four thousand people who had assembled in Pocahontas Park in Vero Beach. The wind off the ocean made the early summer heat bearable and fanned the tantalizing aroma of barbecue over the gathering, which had assembled to celebrate the creation of Indian River County.

  William Jennings Bryan probably caught a whiff of the sizzling beef and pork as he rose from his seat and walked ponderously across a wooden platform that overlooked the throng. His substantial bulk underscored his well-known fondness for such simple food. As the acerbic journalist H. L. Mencken had noted, Bryan “liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen.”

  Bryan—a three-time candidate for president of the United States and one of the great orators in American history—approached the railing at the edge of the platform. This was the day’s main event, a moment to tell one’s grandchildren about, and the people sharpened their focus and prepared to absorb Bryan’s every word.

  They had been listening politely all morning to local politicians congratulate themselves for the vision and brilliance they’d displayed in persuading the state legislature in distant Tallahassee to approve the creation of the new county, which would officially come into existence at midnight, with Vero Beach as the seat. They’d heard local business boosters predict well-deserved prosperity for the good residents, and they’d heard the politicians vow to enact new programs to guarantee that prosperity.

  In the summer of 1925, however, it didn’t take a polit
ician’s promise to guarantee Florida’s prosperity. The state was immersed in a mad, frenzied boom in real estate speculation, and money was everywhere, almost as though the ubiquitous palm trees were sprouting dollar bills instead of coconuts. The frantic land sales in Florida amounted to a boom within a boom. Americans had more discretionary income than ever before, and they were looking for places to spend it. Millions of dollars were pouring into Florida banks in a ceaseless flow from all across the United States.

  So much cash had been stuffed into South Florida banks that a pack of backwoods bandits known as the Ashley Gang had, until recently, been hauling away sacks of greenbacks and vanishing into the eerie, trackless Everglades. Their spree had ended only six months earlier a few miles up the road from Vero Beach. Sheriff’s deputies had killed leader John Ashley and three gang members after stopping them at the Sebastian River bridge. The deputies claimed the gang members tried to grab their concealed weapons, but tales were circulating that the cops put handcuffs on the robbers and then shot them in cold blood.

  Rumor had it that John Ashley had hidden more than $110,000—about $1.5 million in twenty-first-century dollars—somewhere around the gang’s hideout, and a few adventurous souls were braving the damp, deadly wilds of the Glades, looking for the loot.

  It seemed likely that a dredge operator would find the treasure. Developers were boldly talking of draining the alligator-infested Everglades and building elegant, perfect cities where life would be lived as it had never been lived on this Earth. At times their plans seemed to be the fevered dreams of lunatics, but the developers really did have reason to believe that they could, in effect, sell land by the gallon. Every day, trains were bringing as many as seventy-five Pullman cars full of would-be millionaires into Miami, where the population had exploded from about 29,000 in 1920 to 175,000 in the summer of 1925.

  Thousands more were pouring into Florida on the recently opened Dixie Highway, which brought winter-weary Midwesterners to the land of perpetual sunshine. Everybody came with wads of cash and letters of credit, and they were eager to buy land—any land anywhere, even if it was soaking wet. With all the dredging, draining, filling, and landscaping going on, land that was under a foot of black swamp water today would be high and dry in a few weeks and selling for eight or ten times the original price.

  This swarm of eager buyers was driving up land prices so fast that accountants were working as hard as the dredge operators. “It was easy to lie to a prospect in those days,” said Walter Fuller, who was making so much money selling real estate in St. Petersburg that he claimed he didn’t have time to count it. “The typical prospect already had his cupidity whetted to a point his tongue was hanging out. Any old story would be accepted.”

  The speculation mania had spread like a tropical fever to smaller towns such as Vero Beach, Sarasota, Fort Myers, Stuart, and throughout the state. Men of great wealth and vision—the kind of men that Americans loved to idolize in the 1920s—were buying great chunks of land in Florida and promising spectacular things—an end to poverty, plenty of work for everybody, a long and healthful life in the sun, and permanent wealth for anyone willing to invest a few bucks for a plot of land.

  Famed Hearst Newspapers columnist Arthur Brisbane—whose nationally syndicated “Today” column was read by millions daily—had visited Stuart three times in less than a year, and local business boosters were fervently hoping he would buy land there.

  Jesse Livermore, the legendary stock market manipulator and peerless profiteer, was interested in Stuart, and everyone knew a man like Livermore wouldn’t buy anything unless he was dead certain it would soon be worth many, many times more than he paid for it.

  In neighboring Palm Beach County, architect Addison Mizner and his madcap brother Wilson were selling $2 million worth of property every week in Boca Raton. Publicly, Addison touted his development as a city with “every atom of beauty that human ingenuity can add to a land endowed by nature,” and his inspired vision for the city had buyers waiting in line to purchase his beautiful Spanish Mediterranean homes.

  But the rowdy roaring vortex of the speculation madness was in Miami, where even William Jennings Bryan, the Bible-thumping, teetotaling advocate for the rights of the common man, was caught up in the mania. He’d moved from Nebraska to Miami in 1912, and he loved pontificating about the wonders of his adopted state. Miami developer George Merrick was paying Bryan $100,000 a year in cash and property—more than President Calvin Coolidge or even baseball superstar Babe Ruth was earning—to tell people what a wonderful place Coral Gables was.

  At Coral Gables, Bryan looked out at hundreds of eager fortune seekers gathered around the beautiful Venetian Pool to hear him speak. They came from all over the United States, lured by countless stories in newspapers about ordinary people who’d come to Florida, made modest investments in real estate, and quickly resold their property for staggering profits.

  Highly respected mass-circulation magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker, Harper’s, and Literary Digest also were publishing stories about Florida in nearly every issue.

  The lure of quick, easy riches was bringing thousands of newcomers into Florida every day, and Menninger and Bryan, among others, were doing their part to fuel the expectations of instant wealth.

  As incredible as Bryan’s claims seemed, there was a grain of truth to them. In the summer of 1925, sales of property in Coral Gables were averaging $4 million a month—more than $53 million in today’s dollars—and when Merrick started selling lots in the new Sylvania Heights section of Coral Gables, he raked in an astonishing $21 million in a single business day.

  Bryan believed that Florida had a limitless future, and he professed this faith with the same zealous certainty he attached to his belief in the literal truth of the Bible’s scriptures. His appearance in Vero Beach was another opportunity for him to preach the gospel of Florida prosperity. Crowds were as important to him as home cooking—perhaps more so, because William Jennings Bryan had a compulsive need to be the center of attention. “I never see a crowd of people that I do not wish to address them,” he’d once said.

  But Bryan gave something back to his listeners in return for their attention. Somehow, he could connect at a primal level with his audience, sensing their fears and confusions, their frustrations, dreams, hopes, and joys. He absorbed and synthesized this inarticulate mass of human emotions and returned it to his listeners in the form of beautiful, flowing oration that ennobled their dreary lives of struggle and toil. His great, mystical gift was the ability to make ordinary people who lived ordinary lives in insignificant places—wheat farmers in Kansas, silver miners in Nevada, tobacco farmers in Virginia, mill hands in North Carolina—feel important, dignified, and hopeful.

  He’d been doing it since 1896, when he had stepped up to the podium at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and delivered a speech that turned a debate on the merits of a silver-backed monetary system versus one backed by gold into a stunning, stirring, impassioned hymn to the common man. When he finished, the twenty thousand delegates didn’t simply applaud—they nearly started a riot. The cheering “came like a burst of artillery,” one reporter wrote. They were “demented,” another journalist observed, tearing off their coats and vests and flinging them into the air.

  The speech propelled Bryan, at the age of just thirty-six, to the Democrats’ nomination for president of the United States. He became the standard-bearer not only for his party’s political hopes, but also for a way of life and a system of beliefs. He became the champion for millions of Americans who fervently believed in a simple, moral universe ruled by an omnipotent Christian God that unfailingly rewarded good and punished evil. He also fought loudly and diligently for the rights of the underprivileged, and in the process he became known as “The Great Commoner.”

  But Bryan failed three times in his quest for the White House. After a brief stint as secretary of state under President Woodrow Wilson, Bryan returned to his beautif
ul Mediterranean-style home in Miami and busied himself with speaking engagements and real estate investments. The urge to make the world a better place and the lust for political power still burned fiercely within him, however. A few years earlier Bryan had toured Florida, campaigning to become a state delegate to the 1924 Democratic National Convention. But the canny old political warhorse also had seriously contemplated a run for one of Florida’s seats in the US Senate, and he was sizing up the way the state’s voters responded to him. When Arthur Brisbane and his boss, William Randolph Hearst, visited Bryan in Miami in February 1924, Brisbane reported in “Today” that Bryan’s political ambitions were stirring again. “It will please all to know that Mr. Bryan has the old fire in his eye,” Brisbane wrote. “He can smell the battle afar off.”

  By the summer of 1925, Bryan had maneuvered himself into the unusual position of exerting great influence within two groups in Florida, with dramatically different values and agendas. Although Bryan lived among relentless sinners in Miami, he was a leader among staunch social conservatives who were determined to impose dramatic restrictions on Americans’ thoughts and behaviors. Bryan had worked for passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which forbade the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, and he had been a driving force behind an effort to forbid the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools.

  But while Bryan was a puritan, he had no qualms about helping Florida businessmen grab as much cash as they could from the ever-growing hordes flocking to the state to escape annoying restrictions—Prohibition, income taxes, speed limits—and frolic in a land of tropical excesses. He was happy to stand before these throngs of scofflaw hedonists and tell them they’d truly found Paradise.